Let’s just come right out with it: Moisson Livide’s debut album is a magical, righteous, utterly triumphant display of blackened folk metal.
Hailing from the region in the southwest of France historically known as Gascony, Moisson Livide (“Livid Harvest”) is primarily the brainchild of Baptiste Labenne. Labenne is also the prime mover in the closely related folk metal band Boisson Divine (“Divine Drink”), but here with Moisson Livide he has sharpened the aggression and intensity of his sound while also incorporating a broader palette of instruments and influences.
The album opens with a tidy acoustic guitar introducing a nimble folk theme that soon becomes a propulsive, twin guitar and blastbeat foray headlong into Moisson Livide’s primary mode of attack, which is: memorable and fun as hell. When drummer Philippe Etcheblast really lays into the blasts (as on the ferocious early album highlight “Sus l’arròda”), his intensity is nearly a match for Austin Lunn’s guest drums on Saor’s Aura. Although the first reaction to Sent Empèri Gascon may be to swoon at all the folk instrumentation (accordion, bagpipes, tin whistle, horns, bouzouki, and more), as the album sinks its teeth into the listener, the most impressive thing is actually that basic, most important thing: the songs. True to the lineage of folk music, Labenne has a gift for spinning out melodies that feel simultaneously fresh and ancient, and then to build grandiose yet internally logical compositions around them. In this way (as well as in several others), there’s a strong connection to early Moonsorrow throughout the album.
But hey, I’m making this album sound like a dry-ass seminar in history and mathematics. I will repeat: it is fun as hell, and there’s truly a little something for almost everyone. If you think folk metal is too soft and sappy, there is plenty of rocket-fueled black metal intensity. If you think black metal is terminally self-serious, the album brims over with warmth and chest-thumping exuberance. If you think metal loses its way when it fetishizes extremity, Moisson Livide loves a good heavy metal gallop and twin guitar lead. If you hate power metal, well… either crack a smile or take a hike, because there’s power metal aplenty here. Moisson Livide starts from a core of folk metal but radiates outward into wherever the songs need to go: black metal, traditional metal, melodeath, pure folk, punk, cinematic atmosphere, power metal, and more.
Fans of French contemporaries like Aorlhac and (especially) fellow Antiq Records act Véhémence will find much to love in Moisson Livide, but you don’t need to be ass-deep in the underground to know what’s up. If you set aside the folk instruments, Moisson Livide has a lot in common with punchy “arena extreme metal” like mid-period Arch Enemy or Amon Amarth. The songs are bright and boundlessly energetic, yet there’s a thoughtful arc to both the album as a whole and to individual songs which prevent the listener from being battered and overwhelmed by everything cranked to 11 all the time (hi, hello, Wintersun?, take a hike).
The album’s title track opens with a folk version of a war march, including a guest trumpet that sounds very much like a live-action counterpart of Summoning’s synth horns. But perhaps even better than that is the immaculate power and richness of Labenne’s clean vocals, which are often layered two or three times to present a wall of choral might and triumph. His harsh vocals are charismatic and inviting, but when the songs make space for heroic clean choruses, they really soar – think of Jake Rogers’s mesmerizing work in Caladan Brood, or the honey-smooth delivery of ex-Tanagra vocalist Tom Socia.
The more I listen to this magnificent album, the more I keep hearing pieces that remind me of this band or that song or this mood. Moisson Livide’s sprawling folk metal is hardly without precedent, and yet whatever folklore you bring to it – whatever sounds bubble up closest to your subconscious – is likely what you will find. (Case in point: there’s a three-note ending phrase to a riff somewhere on this album that sounds to my busted-up ears like a twin of System of a Down’s “B.Y.O.B.”) Here’s a crummy little map of some of my reference points, but I suspect yours won’t look anything at all like this.
You want to know the extremely scientific metric that I am using to judge this album? When I listen to it, I feel great. Can we… can we just agree that, well, that’s everything, isn’t it? Am I going to tell you, as I listened and thought about how Moisson Livide honors their local history and culture by singing in the Gascon/Occitan language/dialect, that I didn’t spend any time also thinking about the historian Norman Davies’s tremendous book Vanished Kingdoms? Or that I didn’t spend any time thinking about this line from Hamilton: “Who lives; / who dies; / who tells your story?” Friend, I’m not going to tell you that. My brain – yours, too – does too many things to be held all at once. When I listen to Sent Empèri Gascon, I feel great and excited and good. I start to feel like I’ve known the songs before, like I’ve known the melodies from deep in some marrow. Is this some Jungian collective unconscious funny business? Or, shit, is it just some gosh-darn great heavy metal?
I hope you listen to Moisson Livide, and I hope it makes you feel great.
